1. Field
The present disclosure relates to rate-distortion optimization-based quantization methods and apparatuses, and more particularly, to a technique of calculating a value of a coefficient level considering rate-distortion optimization and searching for a last significant coefficient.
2. Description of the Related Art
As hardware for reproducing and storing high resolution or high quality video content is being developed and supplied, a need for a video codec for effectively encoding or decoding the high resolution or high quality video content is increasing. According to a general video codec, a video is encoded according to a limited encoding method based on a coding unit having a predetermined size.
Image data of the space domain is transformed into coefficients of the frequency domain via frequency transformation. According to a video codec, an image is split into blocks having a predetermined size, discrete cosine transformation (DCT) is performed on each block, and frequency coefficients are encoded in block units, for rapid calculation of frequency transformation. Compared with image data of the space domain, coefficients of the frequency domain are easily compressed. In particular, since an image pixel value of the space domain is expressed according to a prediction error via inter prediction or intra prediction of a video codec, when frequency transformation is performed on the prediction error, a large amount of data may be transformed to 0. According to a video codec, an amount of data may be reduced by replacing data that is consecutively and repeatedly generated with small-sized data.